My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  They part, and Michael fastens his overcoat and holds the door open. She steps out into the hallway and waits, eyes averted, while he surveys the room one final time to assure himself that they are not leaving anything of themselves behind. This is something he always does, and part of it is habit, the fear of a mistake. But there is also an element of preservation in the act, some need to burn the details into his mind, just as it is, empty but alive still with the feel of them, the scene of their latest crime. Then he switches off the light, and they go.

  At the station, the train is at the platform. Everything about Coney Island looks different in the darkness, especially when considered through the sleety curls of a north wind. The place exudes a menace that is absent or held to a discretionary distance during daylight. Alleyways yawn, horned music seeps through walls and locked doors out into the early night, full of diminished chords and open ninths, already swinging every kind of wrong.

  They arrive in good time, a little out of breath. The cold has intensified with the night, and the air has become thick, scalding to the lungs, infiltrating anything that has not been bound up tight. A hundred steps out of the hotel, Michael’s hip began to ache, and in the ten or fifteen minutes it takes for them to reach the station, a pronounced limp has him bobbing leftward, every step tipping him repeatedly apart from Caitlin. To compensate, she takes his hand.

  The threat of snow is undeniable now. A blizzard has been forecast. Michael has known the island snow-clad and with the inherent misery of a bleak north wind at fullest blow, the boardwalk layered in sludge, the footpaths treacherous even to a careful step. But wanting the small comfort of a contrasting image, he envisages instead a morning left bright and idyllically still, with a perished sun stuck in one corner of an otherwise empty sky and everything else caught in deepest slumber, the whole scene, pier and Ferris wheel, streets and ocean, cloaked and flattened in shades of shining white. It’s a dream, a fairytale, but tonight, in this cold darkness, dreams are what he needs.

  The old man at the hotel desk had not even glanced at them as they left. Bald and grey-skinned, with a long face narrowing over a square chin and heavy black-framed glasses perched high up on a thin Roman nose, he sat forward, leaning on one elbow in a way that set him lopsided, and as they approached and came abreast of him he kept his attention fixed on his newspaper. Michael, bothered by this and even a little bit angered, had wanted to stop and draw the man’s attention, to force some acknowledgement for what he’d just condoned under his or his boss’s roof. But Caitlin’s determined step had urged them ahead, and after they’d passed the desk it ceased to matter quite so much. They strode on through the small lobby, side by side and of a pace with one another but keeping modestly apart, the staccato gunshots of their shoe heels sounding steady and if anything too assured on the faded mosaic floor tiles. A table stood against the wall just left of the doorway, with a small white-and-pink marble top, the bisected remains of something originally octagonal but now trapezoidal and two-legged, its otherwise impossible balance assured by a hidden fix. Perched in the centre was a narrow blue ceramic vase with a pair of nylon daffodils protruding from its fluted neck and facing away from one another, and scattered on the marble, like fanned blackjack hands, two randomly tossed sets of room keys. That hotels like this still exist, ones which specialise primarily in short-term stays, is down to economy and demand, and they shape their service accordingly, operating this kind of convenient drop-off system, and accepting, and indeed actively encouraging, straightforward cash transactions. As they skirted the table, Michael lifted their own keys from his coat pocket and set them down, with discretion, alongside the others. He was easy with it, having done this sort of thing before. But he still knew better than to look back.

  At this hour, just coming on for six, the station should be crowded. During the summer months the platforms will be dense with bodies, with kids laughing, music of ten different genres banging new decibel levels into the already straining din. Shorts and shirts, shoulder bags and boom-boxes, the smells of sweat and salt and fried food. But this is wintertime, after dark. There are some people about, a couple of dozen or so scattered throughout the building, but each is bent against the cold and stiff with his or her own intent, their minds already elsewhere, at home, at work, in the arms or the bed of a loved one.

  Michael leads Caitlin out along the platform to the train. Despite the imminence of their parting, and all that has been said and aired, a certain satisfaction is evident in their movements. They look properly coupled, as though they belong together, each completely considerate of the other’s needs. When they reach the doorway of the middle carriage, he steps aside and with a small gesture invites her to board first.

  ‘Where do you want to sit?’

  Behind her, he shrugs. ‘You decide. Anywhere is fine.’

  She takes a few paces forward, far enough from the door to shield them from any draught, and slips into the window seat of a twin berth on the aisle’s left side. The walk has left them dishevelled. Even though they kept to the shelter of the buildings, the wind, pocked with random flurries of hail, was a blade. Now, warming slowly in these seats, it takes a moment to relax. Michael’s left hand falls to his thigh and he begins to knead at the flesh, trying to loosen the ache from his muscle. When Caitlin catches his eye, he smiles wearily.

  ‘Getting old.’

  ‘Yes. And grey, and full of sleep. But the tune is still sweet.’

  He nods. ‘Sometimes. When I can play it.’

  This is the beginning of the end. They have a little time left, but have already started drawing back from one another. There’s trauma in this, nourished by guilt and self-loathing, but also a tinge of relief. Lovers for years, but time has left its marks, and they’ve learned to rely on their mechanisms of defence. It’s a process, this inward retreat; bracing for another month to come, another month in exile. The problem is that an eruption is imminent. There should be more days like today still ahead of them, but there’s also a strong likelihood, when she leaves this train, that this will be a full-blown goodbye. They won’t admit it, but that dread has become one of the colours of the night.

  In an hour she’ll be at home, and daydreaming her way towards bedtime, filling the last of the evening with dinner, steak maybe, and a few greens, depending on what’s left in the freezer. And potatoes, if Thomas insists, though he probably won’t. According to experts, once you touch a certain age you must be conscious of what you eat. And mantra is the key. Repeat a thing often enough and you’ll begin to believe it; believe it long enough and maybe you’ll even start to heed its warning. And these days, potatoes are, pretty much, the devil. White bread, too. Thomas has been trying to cut back on the carbohydrates. He keeps insisting that he’s not a kid any more, hanging the statement out there as if in hope of contradiction. Steak is still, for now, an option, but in restaurants he has taken to ordering the fish, something he never used to do. Talking up things like turbot and flounder, forking the air with his enthusiasm, insisting that she try a bite, just to taste, because the body takes such an age to break down beef. It’s possible that he’ll ask where she’s been all day, but it won’t be meant as an interrogation. And he’ll accept whatever she says, because it suits him to do so. She’ll busy herself with putting on water for coffee or buttering a piece of bread, any small chore that keeps her moving and from having to look him in the eye as she answers. She has learned that airy distraction equates to innocence. It’s all to do with tone. So, today, she’ll say, was about lunch with a couple of the girls. Nothing too exciting. A birthday celebration for one of her invented friends, Harriet, or Lucia. The name she chooses will be new to him, but he’ll still try, with silence, to conceal this fact. Just in case it’s someone she’ll expect him to know. She’ll tell him that they chose a nice place, too; a little bistro in the Village, maybe. Just a salad day, though, apart from a slice of cheesecake. But it was a birthday, after all, and a soul needs its nourishment. They stayed on, chatti
ng and drinking coffee until nearly three, and the place was empty when they left, but of course nobody said anything. And the rest of the afternoon got lost on book shopping. It’s always the same. You go in with one thing in mind and then get distracted at a cost of hours. Today, in the Strand, it was the Anne Tyler shelf, and a new translation of early Neruda poems. That’ll be enough, because books are the one subject guaranteed to tune him right out. But, should something more be required, she can easily bracket the excuse with a few shoe-store visits, detailing some hopeless search for a pair that might go close to matching her newest dress, the off-white with the gold and green leaf. Really, it’s all about telling him what he expects to hear, and what will be easiest for him to believe.

  A ghost watches her. The glass at her left shoulder is crusted with dirt. The soluble whiteness of the carriage’s lights burn an overlay against the outer dark and, inches away but set somehow deeper than that, caught in the fold between dimensions, her reflection has an eerie hollowness, there but with a textural suggestion of absence, like a memory of someone already departed. Everything is shadows and light, the way the whole world is, every image made up of one and the other. The face gazing back in black-eyed stare looks both like her as she is and has always been but also like she’ll perhaps be, some twenty, thirty years from now. Some elements align with what she knows by heart, but at least as many jar. Exposure to the wind has savaged her. She makes a spirited but futile pass at patting down the corkscrews and flapping spools of her hair and, tired to the bone, leans her head back against the seat’s rest and closes her eyes. When she opens them again a second or two later, the ghost is still watching, expressionless and full of judgement. She faces front, trying to escape, then lowers her gaze to the fumbling game her fingers are playing above the wedged crevice of her lap.

  The train door shuts, a shuddering action that shifts the equilibrium. Michael looks at her and nods his head, almost as if she has asked a question. Stupidly, she nods in response, and sets her hand on the back of his. They sit there, braced for something, but the engine comes alive from a place within, a kraken stirring. Caitlin feels the vibrations rise up through her, full beats of time in advance of any sound. And then they are easing forward. So much goes unseen, so much exists beyond what the brain can definitively comprehend. Movement, atmosphere, love.

  ‘Are you working tomorrow?’

  His teeth clench, making something mean of the sigh. ‘Oh, Christ, work.’

  She looks at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Just the usual bullshit.’

  ‘I thought things were going well for you.’

  ‘They are. For the most part. At least on a scale of nickels and dimes. But a lot has changed. These days, I nearly have to get down on my knees and beg just to get what should be mine by rights. There was a time, not so long ago either, when a handshake meant something, you know? When a man’s word was diamond. Now you close a deal and ten minutes later you find out the punk kid at the next desk was listening in on your conversation the entire time and that while you were on a toilet break or dropping off some mail for the afternoon collection he had the balls to punch redial on your phone – not his, mind; yours – and settle for a commission slash just to undercut and undermine you. And you know what they say to that when you take the matter upstairs? Initiative. Good for the company. They don’t care about decency, or honesty, or honour. They don’t give a shit. If they can save half a cent on a job, they’re ecstatic. Money is the thing now. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘You could pack it in.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You could.’

  ‘And start afresh?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘At my age.’

  ‘At our age.’

  Someone has decorated the carriage’s ceiling, overhead and all the way to the far door, with great explosions of graffiti. A whole woven nest of shapes and lines, done out in a spaghetti of luminous colours, gaudy as a Dalíesque depiction of Hell and as impossible to ignore. The colours of dreams, maybe the colours of screams. Michael doesn’t even try to decipher what he is seeing. Graffiti is one of the newer art forms, less an act of vandalism than a method of expression. He decides that he can accept it, and far more easily than, for example, bullshit like the Readymades, largely because graffiti has to do with the creation rather than the creator. And decipherable or not, there is, from a purely aesthetic consideration, a crude beauty to what has been done here.

  She turns his hand over and their fingers entwine. The skin of his palm is cool and dry, stiff against the softness of her own. She loves holding onto him, especially in public places. Usually this causes him anxiety but tonight he is either too tired or too content to care.

  ‘Barb’s cancer is a complication.’ He gazes past her at his own reflection in the glass. The added distance makes his mirror image vague, frail yet somehow all the more disturbing for that. The bones in pale relief, the gaping pits for eyes. He wants to look away but is transfixed. ‘But maybe it simplifies things, too.’

  ‘Don’t, Michael. Don’t talk like that. And please don’t put it on me.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. My mind is running, that’s all.’

  Outside, there is nothing to be seen. Darkness engulfs the world. Scuds of sleet hit the glass and leave little scars behind, slash marks that cause tiny dissections of the night. Caitlin’s reflection, a part of all that darkness and yet separate from it too, as if existing on a different plane, watches with a lost expression.

  Holding back from the thoughts she doesn’t want to face, she turns her attention instead to the few other passengers, five in all, spread throughout the carriage. A young Latino couple who have positioned themselves across the aisle from Michael and two seats forward, as well as two women and a man, each travelling alone.

  This is an old game, made for artists and spies. Everyone a character waiting to be written, if she could ever manage to bring herself back to the page, everyone a potential hero. A few rows ahead, on the aisle side of the seat away from the window, is a tall black woman in a black suede coat, with dreadlocked hair pulled back into a tight ponytail that emphasises her leanness, and her beauty. Large silver hoop earrings and the collar of a brilliant scarlet blouse, dark full profiled lips whenever she turns her head towards the glass showing pinkness just where they meet, and huge dark eyes threatening the gamut from ferocious to succulent. Next, across the way, is a white woman, probably Irish but certainly some genus of Celt, middle-aged, overweight in that bulging, thick-bodied way that some women get when they have mothered well and often and some get by straightforward genetic inheritance, layered in cardigans and coats, with large round rose-framed glasses and, absurdly, a yolk-yellow baby’s bonnet hat with what, from these feet of distance, looks like a mottled pattern of green and blue flowers. White ribbon bindings hang undone, straddling her engorged cheeks like tears that have turned to ice or fused into bone. And finally, beyond and on the same side, close to the front of the carriage, a young man, stone-edged Baltic and sickle thin. Wearing his dark hair tight at the sides, full on top and neatly combed out of a left parting, with meticulously shaped sideburns that angle nearly all the way to the corners of his mouth. He sits sideways in his seat with one leg thrust out into the aisle, his slim booted foot bobbing in mid-air, and sucks on a thinly rolled cigarette even though smoking on the train is forbidden both by the red-and-white wall sign and by the law of common sense. Again and again, he gazes back over the arm that rests along the seat’s upper frame, as if expecting the scene in that direction to somehow change, his eyes bouncing from face to face in screaming dread of finding someone he might know.

  A fine cast, full of potential, different in every surface way, yet sharing an isolation.

  The couple are something else. They are in love. Perhaps as young as sixteen, certainly not yet twenty, they talk in whispers and sighs, full in their contact with one another and restless only because that is nowhere near enou
gh for them. Caitlin can only see the back of the boy’s head, with its crow-black hair cropped nearly to his scalp, and the narrowness of his shoulders tucked inside a white-collared shirt and fraying denim jacket. Entirely the wrong sort of clothes for the weather, but at that age, and that much in thrall, boys do not feel the cold. The girl he’s with has the window seat and so Caitlin can see her face clearly, and it is a beautiful face, the skin tawny in the searing whiteness of the carriage’s strip lighting, probably a little darker in the natural wash of day. Her large black eyes simper, dreamily hooded, and her full, pouting mouth veers in little snaps between the coyness of a grin and a condition that is serious to the point of brusque. In stillness she looks her age, a late teen, but in talk, even in unheard talk, the movement turns her terrifyingly young. Her front teeth are large and childish, each critically separate from the next. That is probably one of the things about her that the boy finds most captivating, a morsel of detail on which to focus, and one that comes easily to mind for him during the smallest hours of lonely nights. As part of a different face, those teeth could compromise the fine balance of attraction, but for this girl they are just right. Her hair, rich and full of her ancestry’s Indian inkiness and gleaming with the captured magic of early night-time, is worn long and tossed, carelessly youthful, and kept from her face by a simple red plastic band. From word to word her face widens and contracts, the talk like breath, urgent and essential to her existence. Elongated, heartened, stretching, slackening. Yet her beauty goes unchallenged, a clear absolute set apart from anything purely physical.

  The pair exude happiness. Age does not enter into the equation. Love is love, to be taken wherever it is found. Caitlin watches them until they kiss, until the girl tilts her head into just the right inviting slant and the boy, reading the situation perfectly and perhaps even anticipating it, even instigating it with a particular promise or sworn oath, leans in. Then it is time to look away, to leave them with what they have found in one another. The rest can be easily enough imagined.